I am a Professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Biomathematics departments. A major goal of my research is to quantify and understand the possible functions, forms, and interactions of biological systems that result in the extraordinary diversity in nature. I have studied a wide range of areas such as metabolic scaling, consumer-resource interactions, rates of evolution, effects of global warming on ecosystems, tumor growth, and sleep. Complementary to this, I aim to understand how much variation around optima or averages is considered healthy or adaptive versus diseased or disturbed states, which are essentially deviations from normal or sustainable functioning. As I attempt to make progress on these questions, I join together ecology, evolutionary theory, physiology, mathematical modeling, image-analysis software, informatics, and biomedical sciences. Many theories, including some of my work, focus on optimal or average properties, but more recently, I have been working to obtain the large amounts of data necessary to characterize variation in key properties. My new findings about the diversity and variation in form and function are revealing flaws in current models, and I am working to develop new theories that incorporate realistic amounts of natural variation.
Open Postdoctoral Position for project on how temperature affects spread of mosquito-borne diseases in connection to NSF EEID grant below.
MORE INFOPiece for Zocalo Public Square on limits of predictive models and technology in chaotic times
Publicaton in BMC Microbiology on suppressive interactions among combinations of more than two drugs
Publicaton in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases on mapping how temperature influences the spread of Zika, Dengue, and Chikungunya
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Second Publication in Royal Society Interface on new methods for measuring, quantifying, and rescaling three-way emergent interactions among antibiotics
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Publication in PLoS Compuational Biology analyzing asymmetric vascular branching in mouse and human and testing whether branching is random or optimal and at what spatial scale
Highlight on sleep research and theory in AARP magazine
Publication in Royal Society Interface on new methods for measuring, quantifying, and rescaling three-way emergent interactions among antibiotics
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Publication in Physical Review E on algorithm and simulations to investigate investigating scaling and branching properties of asymmetric, space filling vascular networks
Publication in PLoS Comp. Biol. providing new, best tests of vascular models and vascular models based on our angicart software for extracting vascular data from 3D images.
READ ARTICLEPublication in Advances in Ecological Research on trait-based models.
READ ARTICLEJames S. McDonnell Complex Systems Scholar Fellowship awarded to study emergent interactions in microbial and consumer-resource networks.
READ ARTICLENSF EEID grant awarded to study how temperature change affects geographic spread of mosquite-borne diseases.
READ ARTICLENSF DEB grant awarded to study how trait distributions and ecosystem productivity and diversity responds to climate change in the Amazon.
READ ARTICLEPublication in J. of Animal Ecol. on asymmetric temperature responses between consumer and resource.
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NSF CAREER grant awarded to study architecture of vascular networks in plants and animals.
READ ARTICLEPublication in Nature on how dimensionality of search space affects consumption rate.
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